So the query is, are aliens all one gender, or beyond gender, or have cross-dressers and fabulous gay culture icons conscripted the alien look to help us contextualize their gender flexibility within our known parameters? Insecure men don't beat up aliens to prove their Earth heredity, and we don't fire aliens from school jobs. We wouldn't believe they were aliens even if they told us (just like you could be totally fey in the 70s and no one would guess you were actually 'one of them' - just expresssive, artistic, which was encouraged back when I was a kid, thank god). Oh well, we gained some things in some places, lost some in other. Ask not what color the elephant is in the room, for he's electric pink. And if you can't handle it, honey, go back to Janice!
1. Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N. Furter
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)
It took me a long time to see this movie after being turned off by just how lockstep all the 'call and response' stuff was at the show they had outside my dorm in college. Where if you didn't know exactly what you were doing you were glowered at mercilessly. Yeah, said I, that's real "free" of y'all. But lately I saw it at home free of liens and was so blown away by Tim Curry's wry swagger and fey gonzo cool that I clean forgot about all that. A true demonstration of the force and strutting seductive sensual freedom that's to be had when tapping into the source voltage of both genders at once, he's a walking ad for Transylvanian bisexual transvestism, and his inevitable return to his home planet feels like our loss even more than his. We've not seen his like since, try as John Cameron Mitchell might.
"The moment of reckoning is the entrance of Tim Curry’s seminal character: the camera languorously showing his glamorous heels, bustier and Cheshire grin. Even as a straight female, I have to admit my breath was taken away at Dr. Frank N. Furter’s grand arrival. He oozes sensuality from every pore: raw, unadulterated, glitter-honey charisma. The teasing, rolling rhymes, the “an—ticipation” dragging you to the cliff’s edge. It’s one of those star-making movie moments where you know, as the viewer, that cinema won’t ever be quite the same...
"Curry’s confidence riffs off similar gender-bending antics from that other fairly young, rebellious artistic arena, rock n’ roll, particularly the glam rock scene. David Bowie, Lou Reed & Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger: the rigidity of gender identities matter less than the braggadocio, the impertinence, the sass, the sexual chocolate. It is the power of the human artistic spirit: the inner fire is king and queen at once. There is power in both genders and their aesthetic wonderment to draw on, to create, to mix, to inspire."-Jean Kim / Alternet
2. David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton
The Man who Fell to Earth (1976)
Dir Nicolas Roeg
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Dir Nicolas Roeg
Coulda done Ziggy but that's more a concert film, and a short-lived concept, though that is my favorite album of his, listened to constantly my freshman year of college (til I learned all my punk friends were gay and hadn't told me, which turned me into a hippy overnight). For this purpose though, the alien aspect fits more perfectly, especially in his home planet flashbacks, though there his wife and kids are clearly that, rather than some cloned gender neutral tribe. To me the movie never really comes together, though I do relate with becoming a TV-addicted alcoholic hermit.
Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period in the early 1970s had a staggering influence on me. I had been writing about androgyny in literature and art in my term papers in college and grad school, so Bowie’s daring experiments seemed like the living embodiment of everything I had been thinking about. It’s hard to believe now, but when I submitted the prospectus for Sexual Personae in 1971, it was the only dissertation about sex in the entire Yale Graduate School. I completed it in 1974, while I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College in Vermont. One of the supreme moments of my life as a student of culture occurred in October 1973, as I was watching NBC’s “Midnight Special” in my apartment in Bennington. It was a taping from London of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s last appearance as Ziggy Stardust—a program oddly never broadcast in the U.K. Bowie looked absolutely ravishing! A bold, knowing, charismatic creature neither male nor female wearing a bewitching costume straight out of the Surrealist art shows of the Parisian 1930s: a seductive black fish-net body suit with attached glittery plaster mannequin’s hands (with black nail polish) lewdly functioning as a brassiere. I instantly realized that Bowie had absorbed the gender games of Andy Warhol’s early short films, above all “Harlot,” with its glamorous, sultry drag queen (Mario Montez). Hence I viewed Bowie, who became one of the foundational creators of performance art, as having taken the next major step past Warhol in art history. I never dreamed that someday I would see that brilliant fish-net costume inches away in a display case at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where I was lucky enough to catch the V&A’s Bowie costume show two years ago. It was a sacred epiphany, like seeing a splinter from the True Cross. - Camille Paglia, SalonProbably the key figure in helping gay teens to--if not come out--at least get flashier, more expressive, amidst my generation if no other, Bowie showed a way to stay chameleonic, undefinable. More than sexual bent, Bowie that made it OK to be an alien, beyond all dualities set by society. And in accepting the alien, or being challenged with a confident, gorgeous, stylish, intelligent alien, the merely gay or bi or trans amongst us became easier to accept.
3. Jaye Davidson as Ra
STARGATE (1994)
Dir Roland Emmerich
Dir Roland Emmerich
Though he speaks in a deep otherworldly long-dead language, The mighty Ra is quite the fey little aesthete, keeping his style elegantly fused with his weaponry, ships, and entourage, a unified and very chic combination of HR Giger-style anthropomorphism and the ancient Egypt we all know from pictures and its fun to imagine the whole weird ancient Egyptian iconography and aesthetic as one crazy fashionista alien's own unique haute couture style. Davidson is quite the elegant effete 'beautiful boy' and makes his Ra a kind of way beyond-duality super being, the type of Apollonian super androgyne of the type to make Camille Paglia proud. If she ever does write goddamned volume two of Sexual Personae, I imagine she'll find time to mention Davidson here, who alas wasn't in too many films aside from this and Crying Game, his big 'breakout.'
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4. Slavitza Jovan as Gozer (the Gozarian)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
Dir Ivan Reitman
Dir Ivan Reitman
An 80s film to its giant Stay-puff craw, naturally the main villain from an exterior dimension, Gozer, is going to look like Sheena Easton and appear in front of a giant all-seeing eye pyramid, flanked by two mighty slors. Confusing even downtown New Yorkers as to his/her gender, Gozer the Gozarian's face and demeanor are the epitome of the then-in-full effect MTV fabulous of the moment, a bold and brilliant choice. S/he doesn't get too many lines but lets his/her lightning do the talking, in an old lady Pazuzu-homage voice. "Then dieeeee!" - that's fierce, Gozer! Lavender lightning is always the fashion!
5. John Rhys Davies -
VELVET GOLDMINE (1997)
Dir Todd Haynes
Though it seems to prize image and sound over substance, to become some half-awake reverie set to some great T. Rex, Stooges, Eno covers and glamsy originals, and offers one of the rare, stunning performances by the always uneven Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop, it's the gorgeous eyes and face of Davies that lingers in even the straightest dude's locket memory. In fabulous outfits like the one above, Davies plays a kind of a Bowie/Jobriath-style glam alien meteor who fakes his own assassination, but why? As a performance art thing? To dodge the notoriously stringent British taxman? Because fans were making life wearisome? Showing up once in awhile at the druggier glam shows, (shadowed under Bowie MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH-style hats) to pout that there's still a music scene without him, only a terribly unconvincing Christian Bale (clip-on costume earring and make-up presumably lifted from his mum's drawer) as a bisexual rock journalist seems to notice him here and there. Oh Bale, you're such a square rock journalist you might as well be written by Cameron Crowe!My problem with Todd Haynes has always been his devotion to a kind of sickly housewife 50s color scheme, which I personally abhor (maybe it's from being very bored as a kid at the homes of various grandparents), and his weakness for Eisenstein fetish editing that collapses any kind of narrative cohesiveness or drive (if it wasn't for the songs to anchor them Haynes would leave time behind altogether - and while that kind of stuff is fun to edit, it's often frustrating to watch, especially if you're not enthralled by a certain era of suburban decor), and his 'one step out of the closet looking in' dourness. His gay odysseys are like a less flashy or raunchy or druggy version of Greg Araki's, which means nothing to anyone unless they've endured an Araki movie all the way to the end (which only dutiful second stringer critics like myself have ever done, unless the PR lady at the press screening isn't watching the Exit).
See also HEDWIG and THE ANGRY INCH - god knows I did, at the Jane Theater and on the screen. Alas... I still cry to "The Origin of Love." I'm oily human - it was the 90s man. Damn right that was me at Wigstock 98. You wanna choose up sides?
6. Richard Lynch (as God?)
GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)
Dir Larry Cohen
He's an artificially transplanted alien who can turn people homicidal with a glance, and he has a woman's sex organs, sort of, and he's, well I can't spoil it.I'm fascinated by the life imitates art trajectory, fearless really, of self-inflicted burn victim Richard Lynch... who doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze during a strong acid trip - and so appears all the time covered in a thick gel and hideously scarred, and nearly always playing roles (that I've seen) that have him dying in fire, or having something to do with fire. I mean I would never be able to get within a mile of match if I were him, that's gutsy. I don't buy him as a cult leader either here, as the smolder-glanced hybrid alien, nor in the cult he convinces to burn themselves up together in BAD DREAMS, but I'm in awe of him anyway. A living example that some of those old LSD wives tales could be true, it's exhibit A in why, as I think, LSD should be strictly monitored by the government with agent 'guides' being consigned to sell it and provide a kind of communal garden / arts and crafts room which to monitor like a chill out tent -kindergarten teacher- therapist - shaman - counsellor. Lord knows I'm qualified and would love that as a job. Instead you got people like Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern in THE TRIP.
New World released this, another example of Larry Cohen's unique ability to steal shots on busy city streets, full of unusual casting (Andy Kaufman, probably the only guy brave enough to march with the cops in the St. Patrick's Day parade in full dress uniform while Cohen and company film guerrilla style) and good tough acting with characters who all look like people instead of actors, tough NY people and types - and mixing his high concept weirdness and social messages alongside it - straddling a zone between Cronenberg body horror and Scorsese urban grit poetry, with streaks of humanism and wit all his own.
7.a. John "Bunny" Breckinridge - The Ruler -
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
7.b. Bill Murray as Bunny
ED WOOD (1994)
As Imdb notes: "A serious auto accident prevented Breckinridge from getting a longed-for sex-change operation in Mexico." Is his last name, "Breckinridge" linked to Myra? It is, apparently... and makes sense - they certainly ran in the same decadent glitterati circles. And then we can follow these threads outward into the universe.."Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - Paglia, 521
8. Grey Aliens
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1979)
Just why do we associate greys with dudes, when they're quite clearly beyond such things as gender? Reagan famously told Spielberg: "you don't know how close to the truth this really is," after a White House screening. One thing I'm reasonably sure didn't really happen was the musical communication, because fuck that hack John Williams --he would think UFOs communicate with bassoons. Then again, Spielberg is a filmmaker and needs visualization and audio for such things, while everyone knows communication with greys is always telepathic. You've probably picked up their signal in your sleep or via the galactic cell phones that drifted into our damper climates millennia ago, the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, or via Salvia Divinorum, DMT, or dying, or a bad flu, or psychic ability - your brain has to be clear enough you can recognize the external-internal voice in your head - and the way you feel a connection with them is very yin/yang - like their female energy courses through you as if speaking through your anima or unconscious ego, or perhaps it's reversed for women. They are facets of our constitution, like Voldemort's soul within Harry Potter (Deathly Hallows 2 is on behind me) .
9. Patricia Laffan as Nyah
DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954)
Dir David MacDonald
Leave it to the Brits (pre-Hammer) to drain the sexy potential out of the old "Martian women need Earth men to mate with" set-up (done the year before, 1953, in the classic Cat Women of the Moon). Tall, imperious, with a voice like Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth I, with theatrical flourish (and a dashing black cowl hood combo), and very tall, she is, in her unsexy way, pretty sexy after all, but it’s all too clear that the makers of this film are missing the point When imagining chicks from Mars they don't come out like Zsa Zsa Gabor, but like a disciplinarian schoolmarm with a severe profile. Laffan's Nyah is deliciously butch, glamazon, androgynous, and in the end earns our deepest sympathy. If her planet's desperate enough to want to mate with men from this paltry assemblage, as Britain has mine that their men are too timid even to fantasize beyond the pub.
10. Tilda Swinton -
ORLANDO (1992)
Dir Sally Potter
Not every gender-morpher made this list: mere cross dressing, androgyny, or sexual re-assignment can't do it--not alien enough, as they're generally one or the other in final point, men wanting to be women or vice versa, and those in between either neutered altogether or a piecemeal composite still lacking that 'alien' aspect, i.e. the less not adding to something more than both, but Tilda Swinton has it and rocks it, the female non-musical version of the David Bowie alien archetype in the film that put director Sally Potter and star Tilda Swinton on the map as 'the' androgyne to beat; here she believably alters from a young nobleman blessed with immortality by Queen Elizabeth, to changing in dress, gender, class and demeanor while navigating a wild heavily costumed and surreal ever-evolving England, speaking directly to camera often to forget a solid link that transcends any notion of objectification or subject-as-spectacle, she transcends farther than normal Freudian sexual theory allows, to see how going from male to female is not a castration but a remembrance and encompassing, like wood rejoining fire and air rather than disintegration.
11. Brigitte Lin - Dawn (of the Sun-Moon Sect)
SWORDMAN 2 (1992)
Dir Tsui Hark
Lin really shines in the chance to play a role where she starts out as a guy but in her supernatural fighting ability leads to a softening of the skin and feminization of self, a side effect of mastering a rare martial arts manual that demands auto-castration, which I've heard mention in a few other films --as eunuchs were once a ruling class of immortal warriors - or something can know both the yin and yang, male and female power centers. But s/he keeps her maid lover but falls in love with Jet Li (and has them sleep together later while she's off killing his brothers). Why, Jet? Because he makes her laugh with his philosophical simplicity and deep love of alcohol (naturally I relate), preferring wine, in a beautifully done scene, to the follies of man and his continual struggle for power and rule; Lin's sacrificed his/her wang to have ultimate power while Li's sacrificed all interest in the world (or is trying to) in favor of a continual buzz and settlement on Ox Mountain (if he ever gets there). It's really beautifully played between them, as Jet Li has such an innocent semi-bewildered look in his eyes, like he's imagining a cheery childhood moment at all times. Plus, he's such an amazing martial artist that his/her martial arts skill is mind-boggling no matter if he's 'wearing a wire,' so it's not like he's just some boomerang slacker trying to drink his way out of getting a job like some people I have known, Erich. Together they're a flutter of robes like two butterflies right before she kills them with his/her choice weapon: sewing needles
12. Voice of Billy Boyd as Glen/Glenda
SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
Dir. Don Mancini
I'll never forget my ex-almost lover's wife driving me to the train after a weekend at Woodstock and her kid in the back, maybe ten or nine, announcing "I'm going to practice my box stitch," with a kind of randomness that was quite moving. When I was his age neither I nor any living boy I would dare make such a statement with such casual disregard for gender norms, especially in front of a male stranger. I knew then that we might be going to hell in a handbasket as a globe, but at least things were getting better on some levels, and kids today were growing up free and clear of those old straitjackets, at least in tony Woodstock. "Practice your box stitch," kid, I thought. Whatever the hell that is.
So more and more there are 'out' kids of all ages, unable or unwilling to commit to old gender confines as they mature. It's all good, of course, as those kids grow free and beautiful while the repressed children wither on the vine.Then there's Glen/Glenda in CHILD'S PLAY. The toymaker forgot to give him/her genitals and his short hair could just be Mia Farrow-esque. Maybe the future will show him/her to be a trailblazer, too. I reviewed the film back in the day but can't remember much about it, except of course that Don Mancini's love of the genre shows in every frame and that Jennifer Tilly (as herself!) has a field day. I've never been a fan of Chucky's whole blue collar balding ginger whiny voiced giggling sadism, but I respect it, and dig that Glen/Glenda has more of a sophisto twang.
In short, I'm only looking forward to a few things these days, but to see how this young generation is shaping up is quite inspiring. Though their realms of information is more rarefied (they need to retain less as their brain is ever connected to Google and Wiki), they're fearless and unbound by the dull gender and normative strait-jackets that used to repress the shit out of us. May they perfect their box stitches, and sew our nation whole again.
Honorable Mention: Denver Pyle as "Uncle" Bene
ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (1975)
Dir. John Hough
Speaking of weird kids, this Disney classic was one of the few of their live action films I liked when mom took me back when I was eight. The brother and sister alien's long-awaited alien adult guardian, Uncle Bene's final act arrival is one of weird 'what the fuck?' almost Yoda-esque hilarity of the type only Disney can provide. We have no idea what he'll look like--the "alien" guardian they're struggling to find--as the kids stand by the camper and look up yonder hill. Suddenly there he is, an oversize seemingly male very familiar face, good old Denver Pyle, all dressed in denim blue like he just got done milking the goats. Male, sure, but neutered by age and weight gain, with a full head of white hair medium length and breasts and stomach bouncing inside his tucked in shirt as he comes bouncing down the green hill like the blue jean-wearing wizard that just ate Julie Andrews on the Sound of Music mountain. There's no intention, perhaps, consciously, on Disney's part, to make him seem androgynous, but so he is, made so by age and weight contributing to apparent surplus of estrogen, like a good alien would have.
In fact, after the Dickensian strife and struggling with shady millionaires and their henchmen and scientists, grouchy old men (though they become nicer) and so forth, seeing such a nonthreatening character is cause for some great mirth and jolly relief, like a summer time beardless Santa relaxing away from the color red. How this character can keep them free of meddlers like Ray Milland one doesn't need to know, with his big belly laugh joyousness he's a Buddha in the sky with white hair and a smile that says "See you at Magic Mountain! You must be at least this tall to ride!"
